The moment I decided to teach my asshole neighbor a lesson, I never expected his marriage to become collateral damage.<\/p>\n
This happened a couple of weeks ago, but I only saw the result earlier today.<\/p>\n
I live in a predominantly Mormon neighborhood.<\/p>\n
I’m not Mormon.<\/p>\n
Normally, that wouldn’t matter.<\/p>\n
But my neighbor across the street seemed to have a problem with that.<\/p>\n
We had never even spoken before he started messing with me.<\/p>\n
He had ten children, and apparently, that gave him a strange sense of authority over everyone on the block.<\/p>\n
About a month ago, on trash day, I watched him tell one of his kids to kick my trash can over into the street.<\/p>\n
The kid did exactly what he was told.<\/p>\n
I watched the whole thing.<\/p>\n
This wasn’t the first time.<\/p>\n
I’d already asked them to stop messing with my property.<\/p>\n
Apparently, that hadn’t worked.<\/p>\n
So I decided I needed a different approach.<\/p>\n
That afternoon, a friend reminded me that when I was younger, I had a pen pal.<\/p>\n
Later that night, I was browsing online and stumbled across a website where people could exchange letters with strangers.<\/p>\n
And that’s when I got an idea.<\/p>\n
A petty idea.<\/p>\n
A beautiful idea.<\/p>\n
I signed my neighbor up.<\/p>\n
Not with anything illegal.<\/p>\n
Not with anything threatening.<\/p>\n
I simply used the information he had made publicly available and signed him up for a pen-pal service.<\/p>\n
Then I waited.<\/p>\n
A few days later, an envelope arrived at his house.<\/p>\n
I watched him open it from my window.<\/p>\n
He looked confused.<\/p>\n
Then he looked suspicious.<\/p>\n
Then he looked at his wife.<\/p>\n
I almost laughed.<\/p>\n
Apparently, the letter was from a woman named “Melissa” who had been matched with him through the service.<\/p>\n
I hadn’t written the letter.<\/p>\n
I hadn’t contacted the woman.<\/p>\n
The website had done exactly what it promised.<\/p>\n
Matched him with someone looking for a pen pal.<\/p>\n
I thought that would be the end of it.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t.<\/p>\n
More letters arrived.<\/p>\n
His wife began collecting them.<\/p>\n
I could see her standing at the mailbox every afternoon.<\/p>\n
Then one day, I watched her confront him.<\/p>\n
They argued on the front porch.<\/p>\n
He threw his hands up.<\/p>\n
She pointed toward the letters.<\/p>\n
I assumed he’d simply explain the situation.<\/p>\n
But instead, he apparently made the worst possible choice.<\/p>\n
He hid the letters.<\/p>\n
Which made his wife even more suspicious.<\/p>\n
A few days later, she started checking his mail herself.<\/p>\n
Then came the part I hadn’t expected.<\/p>\n
The woman he’d been matched with was apparently married too.<\/p>\n
She had mentioned her husband in one of her letters.<\/p>\n
My neighbor’s wife eventually found out that the entire correspondence was innocent.<\/p>\n
But by then, the damage was done.<\/p>\n
She had become convinced that her husband was hiding something.<\/p>\n
And when she searched his phone, she found something that had nothing to do with the pen-pal service.<\/p>\n
He had been messaging another woman from their church.<\/p>\n
That woman was not a stranger.<\/p>\n
She was someone his wife knew.<\/p>\n
Very well.<\/p>\n
Apparently, the trash-can incident wasn’t the only thing my neighbor had been doing behind his wife’s back.<\/p>\n
The pen-pal letters hadn’t caused the problem.<\/p>\n
They had simply made his wife look closer.<\/p>\n
And when she did, she found the real problem.<\/p>\n
Earlier today, I saw a moving truck outside their house.<\/p>\n
His wife was loading boxes.<\/p>\n
He was standing on the sidewalk arguing with her.<\/p>\n
Ten children were running around the yard.<\/p>\n
I stood at my window and watched.<\/p>\n
Then his wife looked across the street.<\/p>\n
She saw me.<\/p>\n
For a second, I thought she was going to yell.<\/p>\n
Instead, she walked over.<\/p>\n
“I know what you did,” she said.<\/p>\n
I froze.<\/p>\n
“You signed him up for that pen-pal thing.”<\/p>\n
I didn’t deny it.<\/p>\n
She stared at me for a moment.<\/p>\n
Then she laughed.<\/p>\n
“Honestly?”<\/p>\n
I waited.<\/p>\n
“Thank you.”<\/p>\n
I didn’t know what to say.<\/p>\n
She continued.<\/p>\n
“I thought those letters were the problem.”<\/p>\n
She shook her head.<\/p>\n
“They weren’t.”<\/p>\n
She told me she’d discovered that her husband had been carrying on an inappropriate relationship with a woman from church for months.<\/p>\n
The pen-pal letters had simply made her suspicious enough to look.<\/p>\n
“I was going to spend another ten years pretending everything was fine,” she said.<\/p>\n
Then she looked back at the house.<\/p>\n
“I’m done pretending.”<\/p>\n
I apologized for dragging her into something she hadn’t asked for.<\/p>\n
She shook her head.<\/p>\n
“You didn’t destroy my marriage.”<\/p>\n
She paused.<\/p>\n
“He did.”<\/p>\n
Then she walked back across the street.<\/p>\n
I watched her get into the moving truck.<\/p>\n
My neighbor stood there alone.<\/p>\n
And for the first time since I’d moved into the neighborhood, he looked completely powerless.<\/p>\n
I never kicked his trash can over.<\/p>\n
I never damaged his property.<\/p>\n
I never threatened him.<\/p>\n
I just gave him an opportunity to meet a stranger.<\/p>\n
His own secrets did the rest.<\/p>\n
And maybe that’s the strangest part of the whole story.<\/p>\n
I set out to teach my neighbor a lesson about respecting other people’s boundaries.<\/p>\n
Instead, I accidentally helped his wife discover that the man demanding everyone else live according to his moral standards wasn’t following those standards himself.<\/p>\n
I still don’t know where the pen-pal woman ended up.<\/p>\n
But I do know one thing.<\/p>\n
My trash can hasn’t been kicked over since.<\/p>\n
Not once.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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